Spreading The Word On The Global Google Science Fair

In the latest effort to help encourage teen interest in science and technology, Google is taking the traditional science fair to the web! Announced yesterday, the Google Science Fair is open to students around the world between the ages of 13 and 18.

Contestants, as individuals or in teams of three, are invited to build and submit “interesting, creative projects that are relevant to the world today” - using a suite of Google tools like Docs, Sites, and YouTube—to chart progress from data collection to final presentation. Lowering access barriers and eliminating the need for travel definitely earns Google brownie points, but the really cool aspect of this effort is the heavy-hitting partners—CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), LEGO, National Geographic and Scientific American—who not only make the fair a memorable experience for these young innovators but also a real opportunity to network, gain real world experience and even possibly make an impact on a local or global scale.

Helping them do just that is the panel of prestigious judges including the founder of the FIRST robotics competition Dean Kamen, the leader of National Geographic’s Genographic Project Spencer Wells, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis, and the “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, and prizes ranging from scholarships to once-in-a-lifetime experiences like a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer, a trip to Switzerland to visit CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, or a chance to work on the development of a new LEGO robotics project!

Registration is open through April 4, and the announcement of the semi-finalists will happen in early May. Teachers who want to receive classroom materials, including posters, stickers and bookmarks, as well as get registration information, can start signing up now.